Sarah Palin blasted a “sickening” editorial in The New York Times which falsely blamed her for inspiring a 2011 shooting of then-Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The false accusation, which has long been debunked, came in The Times’ editorial about Wednesday’s shooting of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise.
A left-wing supporter of Bernie Sanders shot Scalise and several other people during baseball practice being held by Republicans for Thursday’s annual congressional baseball game.
“In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs,” the editorial read. (RELATED: NYT Uses GOP Shooting To Falsely Attack Sarah Palin With Debunked Conspiracy Theory)
Palin slammed the piece and its authors.
“With this sickening NYT’s editorial, the media is doing exactly what I said yesterday should not be done. Despite commenting as graciously as I could on media coverage of yesterday’s shooting, alas, today a perversely biased media’s knee-jerk blame game is attempting to destroy innocent people with lies and more fake news,” she wrote on Facebook.
The Times has since corrected the editorial in question.
“An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established,” reads the correction, which was added shortly after Palin’s comments.
The theory that Loughner was inspired by Palin’s political group to shoot Giffords spread quickly after the shooting, which occurred in a parking lot near Tucson.
But it soon emerged that Loughner was a schizophrenic with a long history of bizarre behavior. Loughner himself touted numerous conspiracy theories in online postings.
“As I said yesterday, I’d hoped the media had collectively matured since the last attack on a Representative when media coverage spewed blatant lies about who was to blame,” Palin wrote on Facebook.
“There’s been no improvement. The NYT has gotten worse.”